Crispers Full of Feces
Quite a few people told me that if I waited patiently, my son would one day magically know how to go to the bathroom on the toilet. I’ve been “potty training” my son for almost eight months, and up until this week, “training” consisted mainly of me mopping up pee and poop off the floors and out of the refrigerator.
Yep, he crawled in the crisper one day to take a shit. No biggie.
Anyway, these defiantly optimistic people patted me on the back and said things like, “One day it will just happen,” and “All in his own time,” and nodded as I complained about how difficult it was to communicate the idea of feeling the urge to urinate with a speech-delayed child. Daschel isn’t silent, but he does have trouble communicating complex thoughts like, say, “I think I might need to go to the bathroom.” It’s been an adventure, to say the least. For the most part, I considered the One-Day-It-Will-Magically-Happen people as well-intentioned but lucky individuals whose children figured out potty way before my kid and therefore had no real understanding of how insanely difficult it could be.
That might seem harsh, but I thought about things like this as I washed out one of Sophie’s dog food bowls because it had been soiled with a considerably raisin-heavy turd.
We took a friend’s advice and got the training seat that goes on top of the big toilet, and let him use his old potty training chair as a step stool up to the big potty. Right away he started peeing in the potty, and days later he is still going strong. A couple accidents have occurred, mainly due to the fact that he can’t undress himself fast enough to get up on the pot. We’re stoked, though, because he’s actually asking us to go to the potty.
By stoked, I of course mean absolutely and totally annoyed. I’m pretty sure I’ll never be happy with this entire potty situation until he’s grown and out of the house. Already I’m missing changing diapers and knowing that if I’m out, and he takes a shit, I can go into the bathroom and fix it. Now, when I get a chance to sit down or take a shower, it’s like a cue for him to go to the bathroom. No sooner than I step in the shower does he start in with the “Potty mama potty! POTTY POTTY POTTY POTTY POTTY POTTY!”
It’s like a siren going off in my head. I woke up in the middle of the night yelling at Mike, “GET HIM TO THE POTTY!” There’s no time to wait if he tells us he has to go. Once he says “Potty”, we have like two minutes max to get him there before it’s an accident. I’m not pressuring him to do it all on his own because I don’t want to deflate his little potty ego. We’ll worry about holding it until we get undressed by ourselves later. For now, I’m helping him unsnap his pants and get up on the big potty. Since I’m an intricate part of the potty equation, it’s necessary that I be on call 24-7 in the event that he needs to go. Essentially, I’m a slave to the toilet.
It’s not that I want him to be in diapers forever, I just want him to hurry up and get going without my help. It better happen fast, too, because I’m having nightmares about crispers full of feces and backpacks soiled in urine.
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